“Zinc,” Dyraien’s voice hissed over the wind and cries. “Why are you still here?”
Zinc didn’t move. He stared at the reverse waterfall, at Gotem, at everything but Dyraien. It wasn’t until Dyraien leaped across the room and brought his fist across Zinc’s face that the man broke his fixation.
“Turn the machine on,” Dyraien commanded.
Zinc fled the room without being told again. Both Tahki and Dyraien turned their attention back to the water as Gotem fell to the floor, landing directly in the middle of the obsidian X. The monk’s eyes were wide and his chest rose and fell, but he didn’t appear conscious. And then, over the monk’s body, Tahki saw another surge of energy. It sparked, like a match trying to ignite. Once, twice, three times, and then the air tore like paper in front of Tahki’s eyes. The tear started small, and then it grew.
Tahki was a man of logic. He’d accepted Pooka’s existence, even his encounter with Nii, because there might have been explanations for those. He might have been able to reason with their existence. But as the tear expanded and he saw what looked like a world made of water and glass and stars on the other side, he could think of no explanation. He didn’t know if the Dim existed, but this thing, this place that looked like no place at all and every place at once, was real.
Tahki felt his body lurch. The woman holding him cried out, and Tahki saw Rye elbow her in the face. He stood, fists clenched, eyes wild.
“The castle,” Rye said. “Shut it down. I’ll hold Dyraien here. We need to stop this thing from growing.”
Tahki swallowed. It amazed him Rye could think so clearly when the world had broken apart in front of their eyes. Tahki wanted to say something romantic, like “I’m not leaving you” or “we’ll make it out of this together.”
“Go!” Rye yelled.
And Tahki bolted for the door without another word.
HE RAN and tried not to think about what he’d just seen. Instead, he concentrated on Zinc. In the entryway, he almost stopped when he saw the golden cylinder, skewering the castle like a hunter’s spear. It ran from the third floor all the way down to the basement. This wasn’t part of his design. The cylinder looked to be made of brass. Lines ran horizontally through it, like layers of a cake stacked on one another. The base appeared ten feet wide.
He sprinted up the stairway, his reflection elongating in the golden cylinder. It had to be a conduit of some kind, something Dyraien added to transfer power to the basement. He reached the circular room, the only room on the third floor, and when he walked inside, his breath caught in his throat. He’d only seen the room empty and only entered it to take measurements. Before, the room had been unremarkable, another unused, uninhabited space.
Now, it looked like a room you could control the world from.
The room had been converted to match his exact architectural designs. An intricate system of metal and glass and minerals covered nearly every inch of wall and floor. Twelve glass cylinders, each the size of his body, had been built into the walls. Pipes ran both inside and outside the obsidian. He could see them through the dark glasslike walls, as though they’d been frozen in black ice.
The glass cylinders, lined with a gold casing, boiled water to produce steam, which was then forced into the pipes. They had been made from lightning glass—Dyraien’s idea—and could withstand extreme heat. The needles inside the temperature gages ticked upward. He’d been most proud of the piston valve. He’d modified his design from the steam locomotive he’d seen at the fair. It controlled the steam moving into the cylinders.
Tahki stepped forward and pressed his palm flat against one of the glass chambers. The thump of boiling water felt like a heartbeat. Water filled the pipes like blood filled veins. The firebox at the far end of the room inhaled coal and exhaled flames.
This wasn’t a prototype or a schematic. It was real. A living thing. And it was his.
He’d spent years dreaming of the moment when his designs would come to life, but he’d never pictured it would be such a perfect blend of power and beauty. No one in the world had done something like this. His mother would have been proud of him.
But then he saw a series of smaller pipes that had been connected to circular outlets all along the wall, and a clear pipe that pumped water from below. He remembered the waterwheel outside. Dyraien had installed a siphon to bring water up from the river to convert to steam. Tahki had designed the machine to power multiple areas all over the castle. But instead of multiple points, Dyraien had all the steam funneled into the golden cylinder, which would carry all this power down into the basement.
That was how he planned to keep the Dim open. Not just by using the steam’s power, but by converting the sacred waters into a searing, concentrated jet of steam. If sacred waters had been used to open the Dim in the first place, they could also be used to keep it open.
Tahki had to turn it off. He searched for the control levers. Two red levers should have been installed to release coal. As he searched the room, a hiss and a screech sounded from outside the door. He moved out into the hallway and followed the path around to the other side of the circular room. There he saw Zinc pulling the levers, a piece of paper in his hand—probably instructions on which levers to pull. He struggled with the last lever, a third lever that hadn’t been part of Tahki’s design.
Tahki didn’t
